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Friday, October 31, 2014

Solera Blending/Golden Brett

I brewed my Solera
about 3 months ago and I’m now going to start moving towards packaging it. I did some test blending with my Golden base
wort and found that 2/3 golden with 1/3 sour was very nice. This will be put in a 1 gallon carboy and
left for a little to blend together and mellow and eat up anything that is
left.

I wanted to blend some
more and add some fruit so I’m going to do another gallon carboy with 1/3
Golden base beer with 2/3 sour to up the sourness. I bought 2 cans of tart cherries packaged in
water to add also. This will sit for up
to a month before packaging.

The solera will be
replaced with the Golden base beer up to 5 gallons in order to push out excess
O2 and give the bugs more to chew on.
This evolving beer will be revisited again in a few months for more sour
beer.

The remaining Golden
base beer which should be around 3 gallons will be put in my 3 gallon better
bottle sour fermenter. Along with the
beer I’m adding ~15 oak cubes which have been boiled to remove the
tannins. I’m pitching a vial of saved
Yeast Bay Brussels Brett and I’m leaving this in the closet for a few
months. Walt from Wicked Weed gave me
this advice after asking him how to get a beer as awesome as Serenity. I also talked to the Mad Fermentationist
about getting the most funk out of a beer and he recommended giving the brett a
lot of phenols to play with and that’s why I open fermented my Golden base beer
with a Belgian strain.

All in all, this
blending should take place today 10/28/14 and I’ll have another 5 gallons of
sour beer working away. That’s 5 gallons
in the solera, 3 for the funky brett beer, 1 which is just a straight blend of
1/3 solera and 2/3 golden and the other which is blend of 2/3 solera, 1/3
golden and tart cherries. Hopefully
they’ll be packaged in a few months!